iTnews: Australia’s first Open Source Census published

As a journalist at iTnews:

Results of Australia’s first large-scale Open Source community census have been released to the public.

Produced by Open Source consulting firm Waugh Partners, the Australian Open Source Industry & Community Report gives voice to the business potentials, patterns and concerns of a previously mute sector of the IT industry.

“This is a first step towards addressing some of the misconceptions and lack of information about Open Source in the Australian market,” said Jeff Waugh, co-founder and co-director of Waugh Partners.

“We were also keen to learn more about the relationship between the industry and community, and understand the industry's need for skills and education,” he told iTnews.

Waugh raised the issue of a commonly-held misconception around what is perceived to be a lack of support and services for Open Source in Australia, despite the international recognition of the Australian Open Source community.

Far from the stereotype of students coding from darkened rooms of their parents’ homes with half-eaten slices of pizza in hand, the census found that Open Source developers tend to be well-paid professionals who service a growing market.

Boasting a “very strong”, “rapidly growing” local market for Open Source in both private and public sectors, the census listed property and business (which includes ICT), education, health, retail and government as industries that are most serviced by Open Source currently.

The report expounds what it says is an industry responsibility to tackle the $21 billion trade deficit generated by the ICT industry. Most of the deficit is derived from equipment necessary for the productive use of ICT in the country, the report says.

“We feel that the ICT industry has a responsibility to address the ICT trade deficit, by creating innovative solutions to sell to the world, but also to deliver productivity gains to Australian business and government,” Waugh told iTnews.

“It is a topic we have raised [to industry and government bodies] on numerous occasions in the past, to some interest. The key issue from our point of view is that Open Source -- the technology and methodology -- has enormous potential for Australian research, innovation and productivity.”

“It's not just a technology issue though -- open innovation, collaboration, and access will be absolutely necessary to keep our small population ahead of the game,” he added.

Open Source was suggested as an export avenue to offset a part of the trade deficit. Currently, 45 percent of the open source industry service export markets, generating revenue of $60 million, the report says.

Furthermore, export services that are based on open source generally sidestep the need for software royalty imports, which the report estimates to amount to more than 40 percent of the ICT trade balance deficit.

The report was sponsored by research organisation NICTA, as well as IBM and Fujitsu.

“The census results are important to IBM and Australian businesses as they prove that the OSS [Open Source Software] industry in Australia has matured,” IBM’s Lotus Competitive Solutions Executive, Kevin Wilson, said in the report.

“Simple facts such as 46 percent of respondents gained 70 percent or more of their revenue from Open Source activities suggest that Australian businesses are already taking advantage of what OSS has to offer.”

The Australian Open Source Industry & Community Report is available for download from Waugh Partners’s Web site.

Looking forward, the firm has planned qualitative research inspired by the industry and community report, including investigating the use and teaching of Open Source skills in Australian educational institutions, and the impact of Open Source in Australian research and development.

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iTnews: CO2-infused plastics may yield green CDs and DVDs

As a journalist at iTnews:

A new technique for the production of plastic may yield CDs and DVDs that thwart global warming.

By using waste carbon dioxide [CO2] in the manufacture of polycarbonate plastics, scientists expect to remove the greenhouse gas from the environment while delivering less expensive, safer and greener products compared to current production methods.

“Carbon dioxide is so readily available, especially from the smokestack of industries that burn coal and other fossil fuels,” said Thomas Müller, a Professor at the Institute for Technical Chemistry and Macromolecular Chemistry at RWTH Aachen University in Germany.

“And it’s a very cheap starting material,” he added. “If we can replace more expensive starting materials with CO2, then you’ll have an economic driving force.”

Through a five-year research agreement with German manufacturing company, Bayer Material Science, Müller and his research team will investigate methods of using the chemically inert carbon dioxide molecule for chemical syntheses.

CO2 produced by power plants during the combustion of fossil fuels is generally released into the atmosphere, where it contributes to the greenhouse effect. By incorporating CO2 into polymers and other materials produced in large-scale, the chemists expect to reduce the contribution of the greenhouse gas to global warming.

Plastics that are manufactured with the proposed technique could be used as material for sunglass and eyeglass lenses, safety goggles, headlamp lenses in vehicles, drinking bottles, CDs and DVDs.

Millions of tons of polycarbonates are sold each year, researchers say, and capturing carbon dioxide in this manner could avoid the release of many million of tons of the greenhouse gas into the environment.

“Using CO2 to create polycarbonates might not solve the total carbon dioxide problem, but it could be a significant contribution,” Müller said.

Speaking at the 235th annual meeting of the American Chemical Society on Tuesday, Müller said that consumers may be drinking from a carbon dioxide product and watching movies on waste-CO2 DVDs sooner than they think.

“I would say it’s a matter of a few years [before CO2-derived polymers are available to the public],” he said.

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iTnews: AIIA backs Swimming Australia in Facebook photo removal

As a journalist at iTnews:

Swimming Australia may have copped some flack over the removal of its members' personal photos from popular social networking site Facebook, but according to the AIIA, the sporting organisation was correct in its instructions to the athletes.

The Facebook privacy crackdown is said to have been inspired by the recent media coverage of swimmer Stephanie Rice’s personal photos. Among the photos are shots of the Beijing-bound athlete posing in a figure-hugging police uniform at one costume party and pole-dancing with a teammate at another function.

Since its 2004 launch, Facebook has extended its reach beyond tech-savvy, Generation Y students to encompass businesses, advocacy groups and politicians. While corporate use of the Web site may yield business potentials, the increasingly public uptake of the Facebook may raise privacy concerns for personal users.

“There are huge upsides for business through allowing staff access to such websites,” AIIA Chief Executive Officer Sheryle Moon told iTnews. “They show they are up to date and Gen Y will certainly want this sort of access.”

“There is also the possibility of alumni tracking for a business; new talent attraction, collaborative problem solving with remote staff, clients and suppliers,” she said.

However, Moon raised issues to do with how organisations should handle confidential business information, to ensure that sensitive information is not leaked. Sometimes, a person’s location information on a social networking Web site may alert a competitor to their activities and clients, Moon pointed out.

Just as there are corporate policies that deal with the use of e-mail and telephone services, Moon encouraged businesses to inform their employees about the risks of social networking sites also.

“The [Swimming Australia’s] request was appropriate,” Moon concluded. “An organisation should be able to request staff – members – to show information in a way that is respectful of the organisation or team.”

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iTnews: Virtual world to help children cope with cancer

As a journalist at iTnews:

Researchers in Canada are developing an online virtual world in which children with cancer can talk with others about their illness, and manage symptoms caused by cancer and other chronic diseases.

By studying children’s perceptions of their cancer symptoms, researchers hope to discover methods for assessing symptoms, and better evaluate the effectiveness of interventions.

“Cancer is a very scary word for children,” said nursing researcher Dr. Roberta Woodgate of the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada.

“We want to help them deal with the subject in a way that is most appropriate to them, and at their level.”

The interactive game will represent symptoms in a non-violent story such as travelling through a jungle or a haunted house and encountering challenges, or symptom experiences, and the opportunity and means to meet the challenges.

Interviews with seven to 17 year olds will help determine content in separate games for children and teenagers.

Woodgate believes gaming will teach children with chronic diseases how to recognise and manage real-life symptom experiences such as fatigue and pain. In addition to helping children take their minds off their illness, Woodgate said the virtual world would allow children to “act” and “react” in a safe and comfortable environment.

“I hope that gaming as an intervention will improve children’s symptom assessment and management, and their quality of life. What we learn may improve the experiences of families and professionals,” she said.

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iTnews: Computer system makes best sports bets

As a journalist at iTnews:

Researchers have created a computer ranking system that consistently predicts US basketball rankings more accurately than polls of sportswriters, coaches, currently used formulas and computer models, and even the tournament seeds themselves.

Dubbed the Logistic Regression Markov Chain, or LRMC, the new method is said to have proven itself by correctly picking all four of the 2008 finalists for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) basketball tournament.

By identifying the 30 of the 36 Final Four participants in the past nine years of tournaments, the method has achieved 83 percent accuracy. In comparison, the seedings and polls have correctly identified only 23 of the 36 NCAA Final Four participants in the same nine year stretch, and the currently used Ratings Percentage Index (RPI) formula identified 21.

Similar to other rankings systems, LRMC uses the quality of each NCAA team’s results and the strength of each team’s schedule to rank teams. The method has been designed to use only basic scoreboard data, including which teams played, which team had home court advantage and the margin of victory.

Designed and maintained by Joel Sokol, Paul Kyam and George Nemhauser, who are three Engineering Professors at the Georgia Institute of Technology, LRMC is set apart from other computer rankings systems in its method of determining the value of home court advantage. LRMC considers how much playing at home helps a team win rather than how many points playing on a home court is worth.

Besides picking the Final Four, LRMC also identified several over-rated and under-rated NCAA teams as potential upsets. Georgia Tech researchers have also been able to show that very close games are often “toss-ups,” meaning the better team barely wins more than half the time.

LRMC’s ranking methodology takes into account the researchers’ expectations that winning a close game shouldn’t be worth as much as winning easily, and losing a close game shouldn’t hurt a team’s ranking as much as losing badly.

Computer rankings systems are expected to have a distinct advantage over the picks of sports professionals and fans by taking the emotional aspect out of the decision-making process.

“As fans, we only get to see most tournament teams two or three times at most during the season, so our gut feelings about a team are really coloured by how well or poorly they played the few times we've been watching,” Sokol said.

“On the other hand, our system objectively measures each team’s performance in every game it plays, and mathematically balances all of those outcomes to determine an overall ranking.”

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iTnews: Is 'industry-ready' a University responsibility?

As a journalist at iTnews:

To combat a persistent skills shortage in the Australian IT industry, educational institutions have focussed their efforts on attracting students to science and engineering studies in recent years.

However, despite the best efforts of Australian universities, the industry remains unimpressed. University graduates have not been suitably prepared to fulfil commercial demand, industry players say.

“One of the things we see with people coming out of universities is that they are generally a fair way behind where the industry is,” said Nick Rodda, Managing Director of hosted contact centre solutions provider, Global Speech Networks.

Estimating two to three years in training expenses to do with hiring fresh graduates, Rodda blamed the Australian tertiary education system for not keeping up with industry demands.

“We hire graduates from time to time with the intention of investing in them to make them productive in two years time,” he said.

According to specialist IT recruitment agency, Kelly Services, employers greatly value candidates with a proven experience in the technologies that are already used by the company.

Naming .NET as the most commonly used programming language being used at present, Kelly Services’s Resources Branch Manager, Jason Fuller, noted an industry appreciation for candidates who have previously worked on time sensitive commercial projects and an experience in high-pressure, commercial environments.

“Employers will almost always choose to have someone join their company with a proven experience using the same technologies that they already use, or may be in the process of migrating towards in the near future,” Fuller said.

But training students to meet exact industry demands may be impossible, University of New South Wales lecturer John Shepherd said.

“For us to actually pick the exact technologies that are going to suit [the industry] and training up our students hoping those technologies are going to suit every company - we’ve got no chance,” he said.

“We could go for the dominant market players and teach all our students those technologies, but that’s not really the point. The point is learning how to learn,” he said.

As a lecturer of database programming at the university’s School of Computer Science and Engineering, Shepherd specialises in the PHP programming platform on top of the PostgreSQL database in his teachings.

While he admitted that the industry tends to favour Oracle over PostgreSQL in commercial databases, Shepherd said that Open Source platforms such as PostgreSQL and PHP are better suited to his teachings due to cost advantages and the ease of access to the technical mechanisms behind the platform.

Rather than teaching any one particular system, Shepherd said the University is more concerned with teaching the ideas behind the systems, which he expects will better equip students to adapt to new versions of existing technologies.

While the university’s teaching decisions may not have completely satisfied the demands of its students, Shepherd pointed out that several training institutions already offer courses targeted to industry-specific platforms and languages.

“We’re not teaching a particular system; we’re teaching the ideas behind the system,” he said, “and that’s what university is about.”

“The students say why don’t you teach us .NET, why don’t you teach us Oracle, and we have to keep justifying that you’re not learning .NET or Oracle, you’re learning Object-Oriented distributed programming, or you’re learning SQL.”

“We’re not a training institute; there are plenty of those going around. If they [students] want to learn version 3.0 of Oracle, they can go to an Oracle training course, or go to a TAFE,” he said.

While he agreed that tertiary institutions tend not to exactly satisfy the demands of the industry, Dimension Data’s General Manager for Application Integration, Peter Menadue, said that the educational tendency towards more academically-targeted platforms has been an ongoing theme for decades.

“It’s true to say that in tertiary institutions, more of the languages that are taught are of a great educational basis and less of a commercial basis,” Menadue said.

“There’s probably a little more of a preference around a spread of things [platforms], including open source, in tertiary institutions, [but] we just haven’t seen a bulk of commercial development that’s happening in Open Source for our enterprise customers.”

Mentioning .NET and Java as programming platforms that are more popular in the enterprise, Menadue encouraged tertiary institutions to make sure that students are equipped with relevant skills.

Meanwhile, UNSW’s Shepherd argued that universities should be more focussed on the long-term employability of students rather than the immediate demands of the industry.

“Is it our job to produce industry-ready graduates, or should we produce people who will be better long-term employees,” he asked.

“The company that takes them [graduates] will have to train them on a particular platform, but then this person should be easy to train because they’ve got the foundations down, and they should be more adaptable in the future,” he said.

Both industry experience and tertiary qualifications are attractive qualities in job candidates, Kelly Services’ Fuller said, noting a rise of work experience requirements in University courses to meet industry demand.

“Depending on what particular industry the client is within, a university degree may be a pre requisite of the role,” he said. “Others will simply need the candidate to be able to display a combination of the commercial and technical experience required to successfully work the role on a daily basis.”

“As employers demand more of their employees than they did 10 years ago, the educational institutions have responded by dramatically improving the level of preparation they put in place for making the graduates ‘career ready’ for when they gain their first commercial role.”

“More and more education facilities are incorporating a level of on site work experience as an integral part of their curriculum,” Fuller said.

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iTnews: Rising interest rates may drive online sales boom

As a journalist at CHANGEME:

As a journalist at iTnews:

A tightening Australian economy may be driving Australian consumers to look online for better deals, online shopping comparison site GetPrice suggests.

As the Reserve Bank of Australia raises interest rates in an effort to curb what has been said to be the fastest inflation in 16 years, higher borrowing and living costs are likely to discourage consumer spending.

Meanwhile, rising wages and the record low unemployment rate of recent years has fuelled the rise of a “borrowing” culture in Australia. Lending to consumers and businesses increased the most in five months in December, indicating last year's interest-rate increases haven't deterred borrowing.

According to GetPrice’s Managing Director, Chris Hitchen, the rising interest rates are likely to drive Australians to spend online, rather than haggling on High Street.

"As we approach Autumn, High Street sales are likely to moderate as consumers feel the pinch of an increase in petrol prices at Easter, escalating rents, falling share prices and the highest interest rates for 11 years," Hitchen predicts.

Price history and comparison data that is available online for specific products is likely to benefit consumers who are on the look out for better deals, he said, citing an especially strong demand for consumer electronics during the Christmas period and in the first quarter of 2008.

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iTnews: New music format thousands of times smaller than MP3

As a journalist at iTnews:

Scientists claim to have developed a music storage format that uses the absolute least amount of data needed to reproduce a piece of music.

By virtually modelling the interactions between a clarinet and clarinet player, researchers have digitally reproduced a 20-second instrumental solo in a file nearly 1,000 times smaller than a regular MP3 file.

"This is essentially a human-scale system of reproducing music," said Mark Bocko, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Rochester and co-creator of the technology.

"Humans can manipulate their tongue, breath, and fingers only so fast, so in theory we shouldn't really have to measure the music many thousands of times a second like we do on a CD.”

“As a result, I think we may have found the absolute least amount of data needed to reproduce a piece of music,” he said.

In developing the format, researchers built a computer model of the clarinet based on measurements of every aspect of the instrument that affects its sound: from the back-pressure in the mouthpiece for every different fingering, to the way sound radiates from the instrument.

The team then created a virtual clarinet player by modeling the interactions between the musician and instrument, including the fingerings, the force of breath, and the pressure of the player's lips to determine how they would affect the response of the virtual clarinet.

After the virtual clarinet and musician were created, Bocko said it was a matter of letting the computer "listen" to a real clarinet performance to infer and record the various actions required to create a specific sound. The original sound is then reproduced by feeding the record of the player's actions back into the computer model.

While they have not yet achieved a flawless reproduction of an original performance on the clarinet, the researchers expect their finish line to be not far away. The team is currently working on including acoustic effects such as tonguing, which is how a clarinet player strikes the instrument with the tongue to better define ‘staccato’ notes.

As the method is refined, the researchers imagine that it may give computer musicians more intuitive ways to create expressive music by including the actions of a virtual musician in computer synthesizers.

As acoustic measurements and modeling algorithms improve, Bocko said the process eventually may represent the maximum possible data compression of music.

Future developments may allow the method to be applied to reproducing the highly complex human voice as well, he said.

"Maybe the future of music recording lies in reproducing performers and not recording them," Bocko said.

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iTnews: Virtual business

As a journalist at iTnews:

Beyond the realm of virtual escorts, real estate agents, and other entrepreneurial start-ups, the Second Life business world has been traditionally dominated by the largest of the real-world companies.

Australian telecommunications incumbent Telstra last year launched what was said to be the country’s first major corporate presence in the online virtual world. Dubbed “the Pond”, Telstra’s Second Life islands aim to encourage customer interaction while creating new sales and marketing opportunities.

Spanning multiple islands, and estimated to cost more than $20,000 at launch, Telstra’s Second Life presence features virtual recreations of iconic national landmarks such as the Sydney Harbour Bridge, Opera House, the Outback and Uluru.

"Second Life is a very compelling package offering entertainment, creative collaboration and business possibilities,” said Justin Milne, who is the Managing Director of BigPond Group.

"We've already seen how rapidly user-generated content has gained popularity online, in particular through our interactive BigBlogs and Game Arena,” he said.

"Now we're taking a glimpse of what the internet of the future could be like - driven by user-determined experience.”

Telstra’s vision of the future looks to be shared by the likes of IBM, Cisco, Sun Microsystems and Dell, which each have launched their respective Second Life presences for a mixed bag of purposes including staff recruitment, research and development, marketing and customer support.

Outside of the Fortune 500 big league, however, corporate uptake of virtual worlds has been less enthusiastic. On top of Linden Labs’s real estate hosting prices of US$1,675 per island, businesses can expect to pay US$295 per month in maintenance fees per island, not to mention the costs of hiring Second Life developers and support staff.

Open source opens virtual doors

In hopes of making the Second Life metaverse more palatable to businesses, enterprise solutions provider Clever Zebra has developed ready-made corporate complexes that it has made available under the Open Source GPL license.

Clever Zebra was founded last year by virtual worlds enthusiast Nick Wilson, on the principle of promoting virtual worlds as a platform for business. The company operates with the simple idea of “disrupting the way development in virtual worlds currently works”.

With the goal of making it easy and inexpensive for companies to work in virtual environments, Clever Zebra offers free copies of the buildings, code and tools that organizations need to develop their own Second Life presences.

Monetary opportunities for Clever Zebra come from additional paid offerings such as customisation, branding, installation, and training.

“I’m fond of the phrase "a rising tide lifts all boats" when describing our philosophy,” Wilson said.

“Unless we make this stuff easy and cheap, we'll never get anywhere, and it [virtual worlds] will only ever be the domain of large companies with six-figure research and development budgets.”

“I think the most valuable thing we have to offer is service, not architecture or code. By making it [the code] free, we make it easier for any company to come in here and experiment, to use SL for what we know it's good for: meetings, distance learning, etc,” he said.

It’s an odd tack on the virtual world business model, especially when compared to traditional virtual businesses whose profits are derived solely from in-world development work.

Wilson believes Clever Zebra to be the only enterprise solutions provider of its kind, adding that the company has received a mixed response to its business model from the wider Second Life community.

“Some folks love us, evangelize us, work with us and hang out with us while we do this stuff. Some folks hate us, think we're the death knell for the SL economy and go out of their way to tell people that,” he said.

“I think it's a pretty good balance. I’m happy to produce products that cause so much passion at either end. I figure we must be doing something right.”

Clever Zebra will this month launch Version 1.0 of its open source development kit, which includes a corporate complex, presentation halls, roads, showrooms and meeting areas.

The company currently spans five Second Life islands with its free, open source corporate architecture, providing ample room to its four staff members who perform all their work in-game.

“We really do work here [in Clever Zebra’s Second Life office],” Wilson boasts. “None of our company have met any of the others; we work from Denmark, Canada and the US and have never met physically.”

The tastefully designed headquarters and has all the appearances of a real-life office, and features numerous workspaces, glass-walled meeting rooms, casual sitting areas in which red couches surround glass coffee tables, and wall art.

“We actually find that by mimicking a real-life office, we get that wonderful effect of spontaneous interaction, and a lot of ideas and information get shared that would never have by just using email, instant message or some kind of teleconference gear,” Wilson said.

“It feels like we all work together in the same space, and get a lot done by just being close to one another.”

Dubbed “Zebra Corporate”, the kit has taken the four-person company some months to build, and has been in quiet beta for the past few weeks. Already, Wilson is aware of three users of Zebra Corporate, including Non Profit Commons, Coventry University's Serious Games Institute, and recruitment firm Kelly Services.

Virtual discussion

Meanwhile, information technology analyst firm Gartner is warning businesses against investing too heavily in Linden Labs’s metaverse.

Citing hardware requirements, server downtime, security, and identity authentication as potential issues, Gartner analysts have advised businesses to carefully consider the risks of establishing virtual operations when faced with the virtual world hype.

"The risks enterprises face as a result of their involvement in virtual worlds are real and can be significant," said Steve Prentice, vice president and analyst at Gartner.

"When planning enterprise activities in virtual worlds, an enterprise's awareness of the risks, as well as a reasoned and objective analysis of them, will enable it to objectively evaluate the overall situation and offset risks against often-nebulous benefits," he said.

The highly interactive world of Second Life could pose brand marketing problems for companies that are particularly sensitive to brand issues, as well as social and ethical positioning, Gartner analysts say, suggesting the use of more heavily moderated virtual worlds such as There, Kaneva and Activeworlds.

By the end of 2009, Gartner predicts that other, more scalable virtual environments will emerge as attractive alternatives to Second Life. Sony’s forthcoming Home, a free-to-download, three-dimensional community for Playstation3 users worldwide that has been planned for launch early this year, was named as one such alternative.

"Second Life is acceptable for pilots and prototypes," said James Lundy, managing vice president at Gartner.

"However, current technical issues would have a significant impact on any organisation that wanted to use it in a production environment, and we are advising companies to evaluate alternatives."

To discuss the potentials and issues to do with the corporate uptake of Second Life, Clever Zebra is hosting an in-world vBusiness Expo.

The four-day-long conference will be held in the largest of Clever Zebra’s ampitheatres from April 24 to 27, and will feature keynote presentations by Erica Driver, principal analyst with Forrester Research; Sandra Kearney, IBM’s Global Director of Emerging 3D Internet and Virtual Business; and David Fenech, Senior Director of Internet Services with Kelly Services.

A separate panel about the value of virtual worlds in the enterprise will be chaired by Gartner's Prentice, and bootcamps for virtual world newbies will run in the lead up to the conference.

Among other guests are Qwaq Forums’s CEO Greg Nuyens, and Nicole Yankelovich, Sun Microsystems principal investigator of collaborative environments, who was responsible for Sun's own virtual world, Project Wonderland.

“This will be the first large scale virtual worlds business event [to be] actually hosted in a virtual world,” Clever Zebra’s Wilson said.

“The other conferences want to talk about virtual worlds, but won’t actually eat the dog food as well,” he said with a laugh.

Having just past the first birthday of his Second Life avatar, 57 Miles, Wilson has great expectations of the future of virtual worlds, and big plans for Clever Zebra.

“I discovered Second Life at the start of 2007,” he recalled. “Within six weeks, I’d quit my social media startup to work with Virtual Worlds.”

“I think this, or something like it will eventually become a huge part of everybody’s online daily lives, and I want to be involved in it, and influencing it, right from the start.”

“We [Clever Zebra] will be working on vBusiness Expo, and vBusiness Legal [conference] the following month, as events are what fuel SL,” he said. “We also want to build a pretty vast repository of high quality corporate and educational architecture and tools, and will keep working on the library.”

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iTnews: IT recruiter signs international hire agreement

As a journalist at iTnews:

A newly-awarded Federal Government labour agreement will allow three recruitment companies to hire and land skilled workers from overseas.

In accordance with a newly implemented overhaul of the 457 Visa system, the agreement ensures that members of the recruitment industry meet the country’s targets for foreign skilled hires.

IT recruiter 3W, which was awarded the agreement this week, expects the 457 Visa reforms to facilitate the recruitment of skilled professionals from overseas to help meet the demands of Australia’s skills-short market.

“In the past, the Recruitment and On Hire Industries have displayed an inability to regulate themselves in relation to the hiring of overseas workers,” said Bruce Mills, joint CEO of 3W.

“Collectively they have made significant returns from this source of workers; however their reinvestment into building the local IT skills base has been questionable.”

“The new On Hire rules bring long-needed regulation and will support appropriate investment and industry development,” he said.

457 regulations encourage companies to adhere to the Australian immigration system by fast-tracking skilled temporary visa applications that are lodged by recognised employers.

While the agreement means that more Australian jobs will be granted to international workers, 3W Director and joint CEO Andrew McCarroll believes that it may alleviate the larger threat of offshoring.

“This overseas pipeline of skills will also allow many of our clients to commit to new IT projects, confident that they can resource these projects from the local workforce, supported by key skills sourced from offshore,” he said.

“We are already aware of a number of situations where this will be a defining factor in the decision not to send whole projects offshore to locations such as India,” he said.

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